Author Archives: yishmaelgunzhard

by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Our parsha talks about monarchy: “When you enter the land that the Lord your God is giving you, and have taken possession of it and settled in it, and you say, “I will set a king over me, like all the surrounding nations,” set over you a king whom the Lord your God chooses.” (Deut. 17:14-15). So it should be relatively easy to answer the question: From a Jewish perspective, is having a king a good thing or a bad thing? It turns out, however, to be almost unanswerable.

On the one hand, the parsha does say, “set over you a king.” This is a positive command. Maimonides counts it among the 613. On the other hand, of no other command anywhere does it say that that it is to be acted on when the people say that they want to be “like all the surrounding nations.” The Torah doesn’t tell us to be like everyone else. The word kadosh, “holy”, means, roughly, to be set apart, singular, distinctive, unique. Jews are supposed to have the courage to be different, to be in but not entirely of the surrounding world.

Matters are made no clearer when we turn to the famous episode in which the Israelites did actually ask for a king, in the days of Samuel (1 Samuel 8). Samuel is upset. He thinks the people are rejecting him. Not so, says God, the people are rejecting Me (1 Sam. 8:7). Yet God does not command Samuel to resist the request. To the contrary, He says, in effect, tell them what monarchy will cost, what the people stand to lose. Then, if they still want a king, give them a king.

So the ambivalence remains. If having a king is a good thing, why does God say that it means that the people are rejecting Him? If it is a bad thing, why does God tell Samuel to give the people what they want even if it is not what God would wish them to want?

Nor does the historical record resolve the issue. There were many bad kings in Jewish history. Of many, perhaps most, Tanakh says “He did evil in the eyes of God.” But then there were also good kings: David who united the nation, Solomon who built the Temple, Hezekiah and Josiah who led religious revivals. It would be easy to say that, on the whole, monarchy was a bad thing because there were more bad kings than good ones. But one could equally argue that without David and Solomon, Jewish history would never have risen to the heights.

Even within individual lives, the picture is fraught with ambivalence. David was a military hero, a political genius and a religious poet without equal in history. But this is also the man who committed a grievous sin with another man’s wife. With Solomon the record is even more chequered. He was the man whose name was synonymous with wisdom, author of Song of Songs, Proverbs and Kohelet. At the same time he was the king who broke all three of the Torah’s caveats about monarchy, mentioned in this week’s parsha, namely he should not have too many wives, or too many horses, or too much money (Deut. 17:16-17). Solomon – as the Talmud says[1] – thought he could break all the rules and stay uncorrupted. Despite all his wisdom, he was wrong.

Even stepping back and seeing matters on the basis of abstract principle, we have as close as Judaism comes to a contradiction. On the one hand, “We have no king but You,” as we say in Avinu Malkeinu.[2] On the other hand, the closing sentence of the book of Judges (21:25) reads: “In those days, there was no king in Israel. Everyone did what was right in his own eyes.” In short: without monarchy, anarchy.

So, in answer to the question: Is having a king a good thing or a bad one, the answer is an unequivocal yes-and-no. And as we would expect, the great commentators run the entire spectrum of interpretation. For Maimonides, having a king was a good thing and a positive command. For Ibn Ezra it was a permission, not an obligation. For Abarbanel it was a concession to human weakness. For Rabbenu Bachya, it was its own punishment. Why then is the Torah so ambivalent about this central element of its political programme?

The simplest answer was given by the outsider who saw most clearly that the Hebrew Bible was the world’s first tutorial in freedom: Lord Acton. He is the man who wrote: “Thus the example of the Hebrew nation laid down the parallel lines on which all freedom has been won … the principle that all political authorities must be tested and reformed according to a code which was not made by man.”[3] But he is also the originator of the classic statement: “All power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Almost without exception, history has been about what Hobbes described as “a general inclination of all mankind: a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.”[4] Power is dangerous. It corrupts. It also diminishes. If I have power over you, then I stand as a limit to your freedom. I can force you to do what you don’t want to do. Or as the Athenians said to the Melians: The strong do what they want, and the weak suffer what they must.

The Torah is a sustained exploration of the question: to what extent can a society be organised not on the basis of power? Individuals are different. Michelangelo, Shakespeare and Rembrandt needed no power to achieve creative genius. But can a society? We all have desires. Those desires conflict. Conflict eventually leads to violence. The result is the world before the flood, when God regretted that He had made man on earth. Hence there is a need for a central power to ensure the rule of law and the defence of the realm.

Judaism is not an argument for powerlessness. The briefest glance at two thousand years of Jewish history in the Diaspora tells us that there is nothing dignified in powerlessness, and after the Holocaust it is unthinkable. Daily we should thank God, and all His helpers down here on earth, for the existence of the State of Israel and the restoration to the Jewish people of the power of self-defence, itself a necessary condition of the collective right to life.

Instead, Judaism is an argument for the limitation, secularisation and transformation of power.

Limitation: Israel’s kings were the only rulers in the ancient world without the power to legislate.[5] For us, the laws that matter come from God, not from human beings. To be sure, in Jewish law, kings may issue temporary regulations for the better ordering of society, but so may rabbis, courts, or local councils (the shiva tuvei ha-ir).

Secularisation: in Judaism, kings were not high priests and high priests were not kings. Jews were the first people to create a “separation of powers,” a doctrine normally attributed to Montesquieu in the eighteenth century. When some of the Hasmonean rulers sought to combine the two offices, the Talmud records the objection of the sages: “Let the royal crown be sufficient for you; leave the priestly crown to the descendants of Aaron.”[6]

Transformation: fundamental to Judaism is the idea of servant leadership. There is a wonderful statement of it in our parsha. The king must have his own sefer Torah, “and he shall read from it all the days of his life … not considering himself superior to his kinsfolk, or straying from the commandments to the right or to the left” (Dt. 17:19-20). Humility is the essence of royalty, because to lead is to serve.

Failure to remember this caused what, in retrospect, can be seen as the single most disastrous political decision in Jewish history. After the death of Solomon, the people came to Rehoboam, his son, asking him to lighten the load that Solomon’s projects had imposed on the people. The king asked his father’s advisers what he should do. They told him to accede to their request: “If today you will be a servant to these people and serve them and give them a favourable answer, they will always be your servants’(1 Kings 12:7). Note the threefold appearance of the word “serve” in this verse. Rehoboam ignored their advice. The kingdom split and the nation never fully recovered.

The radical nature of this transformation can be seen by recalling the two great architectural symbols of the world’s first empires: the Mesoptamians built ziggurats, the Egyptians built pyramids. Both are monumental statements in stone of a hierarchical society, broad at the base, narrow at the top. The people are there to support the leader. The great Jewish symbol, the menorah, inverts the triangle. It is broad at the top, narrow at the base. The leader is there to support the people.

In contemporary terms, Jim Collins in his book From Good to Great[7] tells us on the basis of extensive research that the great organisations are those with what he calls ‘Level 5 leaders,’ people who are personally modest but fiercely ambitious for the team. They seek, not their own success, but the success of those they lead.

This is counterintuitive. We think of leaders as people hungry for power. Many are. But power corrupts. That is why most political careers end in failure. Even Solomon’s wisdom could not save him from temptation.

Hence the life-changing idea: To lead is to serve. The greater your success, the harder you have to work to remember that you are there to serve others; they are not there to serve you.

NOTES

[1] Sanhedrin 21b.

[2] The source is Rabbi Akiva in Taanit 25b.

[3] Lord Acton, Essays on the History of Liberty, Indianapolis, LibertyClassics 1985, 8.

[4] Hobbes, The Leviathan, Book 1, Ch. 11.

[5] See, e.g., Michael Walzer, In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible, Yale University Press, 2012.

[6] Kiddushin 66a.

[7] James Collins, From Good to Great, Harper Business, 2001.

As taken from, http://rabbisacks.org/lead-serve-shoftim-5778/

by Rabbi Jonathan Lopes Cardozo

כי תצור אל עיר ימים רבים להלחם עליה לתפשה לא תשחית את עצה לנדח עליו גרזן כי ממנו תאכל ואתו לא תכרת כי האדם עץ השדה לבא מפניך במצור

When you besiege a city for many days to wage war against it to capture it, you shall not destroy its trees by wielding an ax against them, for you may eat from them, but you shall not cut them down. Is the tree of the field a man, to go into the siege before you?

Devarim 20:19

“Cleanliness is not next to Godliness nowadays,
for cleanliness is made an essential,
and Godliness is regarded as an offence.”

– G.K.  Chesterton^[1]

Throughout most of history, religious Jews’ hygiene standards were far more advanced than those of most other people. Indeed, Jewish law dating back thousands of years contains a far-reaching codex for personal and environmental cleanliness that would seem novel and forward-thinking to many twenty-first century lawyers, environmentalists, and public health-care workers.

Besides numerous laws that prohibit needless destruction of the natural environment and its resources, as well as pollution in its various forms, Jewish Law also seeks to preserve animal life and maintain clean and pleasant conditions both in the home and in the public domain.

The Torah of the Bathroom

In a fascinating narrative, the Talmud tells of the great Rabbi Huna who asked his son why he was not attending the lectures of Rabbi Chisda, a brilliant, younger colleague. Rabbi Huna’s son, in his innocence, answered that he wanted “to hear words of Torah and not about worldly matters.” Taken aback by this response, Rabbi Huna asked his son which “worldly matters” Rabbi Chisda actually discussed. The son responded that the sage lectured about cleanliness and appropriate behavior in the bathroom. After hearing this, Rabbi Huna exclaimed in wonderment, “Here are matters of health [and thus of Torah], and you call them worldly matters!?!”^[2]

On another occasion, the Mishna^[3] states that “it is not permitted to soak clay in the public highway…. During building operations, stones [and other building materials] must be deposited immediately on the building site [and not left on the road].” The Talmud also forbids other forms of litter, such leaving shards of glass in the public domain.^[4] The purpose of these laws is to protect the public against injury, and also to ensure a minimum standard of cleanliness in society.

With their keen insight into human nature, the Jewish sages understood the direct impact of these laws on the society’s psychological well-being. The Talmud quotes a source that states that if a spring serves as the water supply for two towns, but does not provide sufficient water for both, the town closer to the source takes precedence.^[5] The other town, in such a case, would need to find other ways to get sufficient water. However, when it is a choice between the farther town’s drinking water and the nearer town’s laundry water supply, the farther town’s drinking water should come first.^[6]

The Cause of Depression

To our surprise, Rabbi Yossi objects to this ruling and states that the closer town’s laundry water will take priority over the farther town’s drinking water! The Talmud, explaining Rabbi Yossi’s reasoning, refers to a statement of the famous authority, Shmuel, who says that constantly wearing dirty clothes causes depression and mental instability!^[7]

In other words, clean garments are not a luxury. Jewish law considers cleanliness a necessity. The great Halachic authority, Rabbi Ahai Gaon (8th century), ruled that the law is decided according to Rabbi Yossi’s opinion.^[8] A wealth of similar laws and observations are to be found throughout traditional Jewish literature.

Unfortunately, these laws do not seem to be of great concern within many orthodox communities today. Though litter does not pollute the streets of orthodox communities any more so than in some secular communities, one still wonders why rabbis and religious leaders who are so genuinely committed to the Torah and Tradition do not speak out on these issues to ensure that the relevant laws receive the attention they deserve. Indeed, given the spirit of Jewish Law, we would expect that the streets in orthodox neighborhoods would look remarkably cleaner than anywhere else.

By implementing the Torah’s laws in this realm – which should really not be too difficult, for after all, we’re only talking about throwing garbage in bins rather than in the streets – orthodox communities will take away much of the ammunition in their secular detractors’ arsenals, and in so doing, will make a tremendous kiddush Hashem, which is in fact the purpose of being a Jew.^[9]

NOTES

[1] G.K.  Chesterton, Tremendous Trifles (New York: Dodd Mead, 1917), 67.

[2] Shabbat 82a.

[3] Bava Metzia 10:5.

[4] See Bava Kama 29b.

[5] Nedarim 80a.

[6] For full understanding of this statement see the commentaries on Nedarim 80b.

[7] Nedarim 80b.

[8] She’eltot, Re’eh, no. 147.

[9] For further reading on this subject, see the excellent essay by Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld and Dr. Avraham Wyler: “The Ultra Orthodox Community and Environmental Issues,” Jerusalem Letter/Viewpoints, no. 415, 21 Tishrei 5760, (October 1999): 1-7.

As taken from, https://mailchi.mp/cardozoacademy/ttp-1352685?e=ea5f46c325

Diario Judío México – In the pre-dawn darkness of August 12, 1952, thirteen Yiddish poets, actors, critics, and editors were shot by a firing squad in the notorious Lubyanka prison, victims of the psychopathic autocrat Joseph Stalin. They were not the first Yiddish artists to be murdered at his hands, nor were they the last.

The arrests were first made in September 1948 and June 1949. All defendants were accused of espionage and treason as well as many other crimes. After their arrests, they were tortured, beaten, and isolated for three years before being formally charged. There were five Yiddish writers among these defendants, all of whom were a part of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee.

Peretz Markish (1895–1952), Yiddish poet, co-founder the School of Writers, a Yiddish literary school in Soviet Russia
David Hofstein (1889–1952), Yiddish poet
Itzik Feffer (1900–1952), Yiddish poet, informer for the Ministry of Internal Affairs
Leib Kvitko (1890–1952), Yiddish poet and children’s writer
David Bergelson (1884–1952), distinguished novelist
Solomon Lozovsky (1878–1952), Director of Soviet Information Bureau, Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs, vigorously denounced accusations against himself and others
Boris Shimeliovich (1892–1952), Medical Director of the Botkin Clinical Hospital, Moscow
Benjamin Zuskin (1899–1952), assistant to and successor of Solomon Mikhoels as director of the Moscow State Jewish Theater
Joseph Yuzefovich (1890–1952), researcher at the Institute of History, Soviet Academy of Sciences, trade union leader
Leon Talmy (1893–1952), translator, journalist, former member of the Communist Party USA
Ilya Vatenberg (1887–1952), translator and editor of Eynikeyt, newspaper of the JAC; Labor Zionist leader in Austria and U.S. before returning to the USSR in 1933
Chaika Vatenburg-Ostrovskaya (1901–1952), wife of Ilya Vatenburg, translator at JAC.
Emilia Teumin (1905–1952), deputy editor of the Diplomatic Dictionary; editor, International Division, Soviet Information Bureau
Solomon Bregman (1895–1953), Deputy Commissar of Foreign Affairs. Fell into a coma after denouncing the trial and died in prison five months after the executions.
Lina Stern (or Shtern) (1875–1968), a biochemist, physiologist and humanist and the first female academician in the Russian Academy of Sciences and is best known for her pioneering work on blood–brain barrier. She was the only survivor out of the fifteen defendants.

As taken from, https://diariojudio.com/opinion/night-of-the-murdered-poets/276447/

The ceremony that receives more Torah coverage than Creation, the Exodus, or the revelation at Mount Sinai (Re’eh)

The view of Tel Aviv from Mount Ebal. (Wikipedia)

Hodge-podge. That precise, academic term is the first that used to come to my mind when thinking of the Book of Deuteronomy. And it didn’t bother me that this was so; in fact, it seemed most fitting. After all, this was Moses’s goodbye speech to the people to whom he had been utterly devoted for the last 40 years. Of course, it’s a jumble of reminiscences of their most memorable times, veiled reprimands, concerned cautions not to fall prey to the idol worship of their soon-to-be-neighbors, and insistent reminders to punctiliously observe the divine commandments that he had bequeathed to them — just as a parent’s last goodbye as they drop their child off at college is often a hodge-podge of recollections of fond memories, advice and admonishments about everything ranging from laundry to finances, cautions against the influences of the campus culture, and pleas to maintain committed to the values they’ve imparted the last 20 years, all in no particular order.

However, years ago, a teacher (I wish I could remember who so I could give him or her credit) recommended an awesome exercise: to read through an entire book of the Torah cover-to-cover, in one sitting. I did so with the Book of Deuteronomy and was stunned by what jumped out from the pages. This seeming hodge-podge of a book is actually all about one singular event! And that event doesn’t even seem all that significant in the grand scheme of Jewish history; I would venture to guess it wouldn’t make it on anyone’s Top Ten list of the Jewish People’s Greatest Moments. That event is the covenant of Mounts Gerizim and Ebal that God commands the Jewish people to enact there, upon entry to the Promised Land.

First, let’s examine the textual evidence that leads to this startling conclusion that the entire book is actually all about this singular event.

At first glance, this covenant does not seem exceedingly significant. It is mentioned only twice, once for a mere seven verses in our parsha (Deuteronomy 11:26-32), and the second time, 16 chapters later, in Parshat Ki Tavo (27:1-26). Between these two descriptions are 15 chapters of seemingly random, detailed, practical laws, which seem unrelated to the ceremony to be enacted on these two mountains. However, when reading it all in one fell swoop, one notices that the description of the covenant in our parsha begins, “See I am placing before you today a blessing and a curse. The blessing [you will receive] if you follow the commandments of God that I am commanding you TODAY, and the curse if you do not observe the commandments of God and turn astray from the path that I am commanding you TODAY (11:26-28; see also 11:32-12:1).” Thus, what emerges is that the 15 chapters of seemingly random laws found in chapters 12-26 do not serve as a barrier between the two descriptions of this ceremony, but rather as a bridge between them — because they themselves are an integral part of the covenant. These are the laws whose observance or violation will lead to the blessings or curses promised on Mounts Gerizim and Ebal!

In fact, the Torah highlights that the main bulk of this book is all one long description of the covenenant — Brit Har G’rizim V’Har Eival — by beginning and concluding the description of it using virtually identical language, creating a kind of envelope or bookends. The final description of the covenant in 30:15-19 concludes with the phrase: “See I have placed before you today… the blessing and the curse,” which points us back to the opening phrase or bookend in 11:26: “See I am placing before you today a blessing and a curse.” Thus, all of what comes in between these two bookends, namely chapters 11-30 (20 of the book’s 34 chapters!) are all part of one grand narrative of the ceremony to be enacted on these two mountains upon entry to the Land.

The obvious question is: What is the significance of this ceremony that earns it the lion’s share of an entire book of the Torah, far more coverage than that received by Creation, the Exodus, or even the giving of the Torah on Mount Sinai?

The key lies, I believe, in noticing the striking similarities between the covenant enacted on Mount Sinai and that enacted on Mounts Gerizim and Ebal. First and foremost, Mount Sinai has the identical structure of one description of the awe-inspiring event (Exodus, chapters 19-20), followed by seemingly random, detailed laws (Exodus Chapters 21-23 of Parshat Mishpatim), finally followed by another description of the ritual ceremony (Exodus, chapter 24). Clearly, what strikes us as bizarre — namely, the insertion of halachic minutia in the midst of majestic, awe-inspiring Divine — human covenants — is the Torah’s norm. The message seems to be that in the Torah’s conception, there is no such thing as an inspirational interaction with God that does not find expression through halacha, and no such thing as halacha not infused by a meaningful relationship with God.

The similarities between the covenant of Sinai and that of Mounts Grizim and Eival do not end with their shared structure. Both covenants involve virtually the identical procedures. In both covenants, Moses first has to TELL the people all of God’s commands, then WRITE them down, then BUILD an ALTAR, then set up 12 STONES as a monument, and finally sacrifice OLOT and SHLAMIM (compare Exodus 24:3-5 and Deuteronomy 37:1-7 to see the obvious parallels.) In addition, there’s the conspicuous fact that both covenants transpire on the tops of mountains.

The clear message, I believe, is that the covenant to be enacted on Mounts Gerizim and Ebal upon entry to the Land is the second generation’s Matan Torah, the concretizing of their unique relationship with God. THAT is in fact something worthy of virtually an entire book of the Torah.

Significantly, each generation’s covenant with God is tailor-made to uniquely suit its particular needs. Consider the differences between the two covenants. At Mount Sinai, the people are warned repeatedly not to touch the mountain, and they cower in the background, daring to speak only so as to express the request that God stop communicating with them directly, lest they perish. In contrast, at Mounts Gerizim and Ebal, the people stand at the very tops of the mountains, and verse after verse repeatedly informs us that the entire nation declares, “Amen,” after each and every utterance.

Gone is the passive experience of the generation that leaves Egypt through God’s miraculous intervention and then lives by God’s protection and sustenance in the wilderness. Enter the new generation that will conquer the Land utilizing military ingenuity, and that will then invest herculean efforts to farm that Land. Similarly, the focus at Gerizim and Ebal is no longer on the laws themselves as it is at Mount Sinai. Instead, the emphasis has shifted to the CONSEQUENCES for observing or violating the laws, since this generation will proactively forge their own destinies, rendering the link between their success and their observance of God’s commands less obvious.

The powerful message that God and Moses are conveying to the Israelites — and us — is this: Matan Torah — the revelation of the Torah — is not an event frozen in time to be pulled off the shelf of our collective memory every so often, dusted off, and remembered wistfully as something that occurred long ago for our ancestors. Matan Torah is ALIVE. Our relationship with God — both individually and communally — is dynamic, personal, and ever-evolving.

And I would suggest that this is the message not only of the final book of the Five Books of Moses, but through many laws and at critical junctures throughout Jewish history. The commandment of Hakhel to gather the entire nation every seven years for a mass reading of the Torah expresses the message that EVERY generation should renew its covenant and relationship with God (Deuteronomy 31:10-13), as does our reenactment of Matan Torah every week through communal Torah reading (see Shulchan Aruch Orach Chayim 141:4 with Mishnah Berurah).

Furthermore, Tractate Shabbat 88a informs us that during the Purim story, the Jews re-accept the Torah (“kiymu mah she-kiblu kvar” — they upheld that which they had already accepted). I would suggest that this occurs precisely at that time because the Purim story takes place during the first exile of the Jewish people, following the destruction of the First Temple. Perhaps it is precisely then, as the nation is reeling from the devastating calamity and seeming betrayal of exile, that God miraculously saves them, embracing them with the message that He has not in fact deserted them. (And here too, God conveys the message in a way uniquely suited to that generation — hester panim, through hidden means; God’s name is absent from the megilla).

And perhaps, we can suggest that in our own times, the extraordinary miracle of the reestablishment of the State of Israel so closely on the heels of the staggering devastation of the Holocaust is God’s message that though we may never understand His ways, He has not abandoned us.

And so, it seems to me that there could not possibly be a more perfect message for the final book of the Torah than that this is not the end; it is merely the beginning of what will be a new era in our nation’s infinite, dynamic, ever-developing relationship with the Divine.